I was recently invited to speak at a quilting conference, so I’ve been going through my quilt-inspired collage work from the past couple of years and piecing together a slideshow:
Working on a presentation of some of the collage work I’ve been doing for the past few years. God, I love making this stuff. What a gift it’s been to glue and things to the page when I don’t know what else to do… https://t.co/B4feF8ri7k pic.twitter.com/zUwHS2C14X
— Austin Kleon (@austinkleon) April 6, 2021
It’s always a great feeling when you start gathering pieces for a show or a presentation and you realize that you’ll not even get close to being able to showing everything.
Some topics I’m trying to quilt patchwork together:
- Anni Alber’s idea that you must listen to your materials, because they do the dictating of what needs to be done
- How in a good process, the art takes you where it wants you to go
- How in any art form you must identify your materials and set up a sensual relationship with them
- Terminology, and how some quilters got mad at me for calling my pieces “tape quilts”
- finding treasure in the trash, saving scraps
- making time to learn
- the long history of collage
- making ugly art
- the calm of collage
But the more I think about it, the more I just keep thinking of a quilt of days. Each day is like a panel in a quilt. Some days are ugly and some days are raw and some days are chaotic and some days are colorful and some days are orderly but if you keep adding them up they turn into something.
